Month: January 2010

Pseudoscience– banned in Britain

January 22, 2010 • 3:24 pm

by Greg Mayer

A while back, I posted on the shocking use of high priced, English-made dowsing rods by Iraqi security services to detect explosives, dowsing rods being a notorious and well-debunked form of pseudoscience. Use of these devices not only wastes tens of millions of dollars, but costs lives (see the original NY Times article). Well, I’m happy to report that the BBC has reported that the UK government is banning the export of these devices.

Sidney Alford, a leading explosives expert who advises all branches of the military, told Newsnight the sale of the ADE-651 [what the company calls the dowsing rod] was “absolutely immoral”.

“It could result in people being killed in the dozens, if not hundreds,” he said. [Sadly, it already has.]

The BBC went on to report not only the the government action (spurred in part by recent successful bombings in Iraq), but also some analyses of the devices.

Claims of such almost magical technical abilities would almost be comic, if the potential consequences were not so serious.

Newsnight obtained a set of cards [the part alleged by the manufacturer to be sensitive to various substances] for the ADE-651 and took them to Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory where Dr Markus Kuhn dissected a card supposed to detect TNT.

It contained nothing but the type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores.

Dr Kuhn said it was “impossible” that it could detect anything at all and that the card had “absolutely nothing to do with the detection of TNT”.

Do go to the BBC site to see the video of Dr. Kuhn analyzing the card.

Friday miscellany

January 22, 2010 • 11:59 am

Four pieces worth reading today:

Matt Parker, at the Times Online, does some calculations about how much active ingredient there is in homeopathic remedies. (You already know the answer, but the piece is funny.)

. . . The arnica is diluted so much that there is only one molecule of it per 7 million billion billion billion billion pills.

It’s hard to comprehend numbers that large. If you were to buy that many pills from Boots, it would cost more than the gross domestic product of the UK. It’s more than the gross domestic product of the entire world. Since the dawn of civilisation. If every human being since the beginning of time had saved every last penny, denarius and sea-shell, we would still have not saved-up enough to purchase a single arnica molecule from Boots.

On a related note, the Independent reports that a group of homeopathy critics is planning a Mass Overdose!

More than 300 people who style themselves as “homoeopathy sceptics” will each swallow an entire bottle of homoeopathic pills in protest at the continued marketing of homoeopathic medicines by Boots, the high street chemist chain. . .

In England, an estimated 470,000 people use homoeopathic remedies every year. Branches of Boots carry shelves of remedies including arnica, nux vomica, pulsatilla and rhus tox in the “complementary medicine” section. The Queen, David Beckham and Geri Halliwell are among those said to swear by them. . .

Boots said in a statement: “We know that many people believe in the benefits of complementary medicines and we aim to offer the products we know our customers want.”

The Queen, for crying out loud!

Paul Krugman, at the New York Times, urges Democrats to pass the Senate health care bill now, regardless of what happened in Massachusetts. He’s right.  I’m so sick of hypocritical Republicans saying that we have to “go slow” on health care.  Does anybody really think they want a health care bill?  If you do, you’re living on Mars.  They want the status quo, and to obstruct any progressive legislation in the offing.  Damn them all.

Bear in mind that the horrors of health insurance — outrageous premiums, coverage denied to those who need it most and dropped when you actually get sick — will get only worse if reform fails, and insurance companies know that they’re off the hook. And voters will blame politicians who, when they had a chance to do something, made excuses instead.

Ladies and gentlemen, the nation is waiting. Stop whining, and do what needs to be done.

Over at Salon, pilot Patrick Smith decries the overreaction around “security breaches” at airports.

What has become of us? Are we really in such a confused and panicked state that a person haplessly walking through the wrong door [he’s referring to Jules Paul Bouloute’s accidental tripping of a security door at Kennedy airport] can disrupt air travel nationwide, resulting in mass evacuations and long delays? “The terrorists have won” is one of those waggish catch-alls that normally annoy me, but all too often it seems that way. Our reactionary, self-defeating behavior has put much at stake — our time, our tax dollars and our liberties.

What made Darwin sick?

January 22, 2010 • 6:50 am

Most of you know that, after returning to the UK from the Beagle voyage, Darwin developed a debilitating illness that involved nausea, “inordinate flatulence” (hard for me to imagine the old man continuously passing wind), and, worst of all, bouts of vomiting.  He had this on and off for the rest of his adult life.  If you visit Down House, you’ll find in Darwin’s study a folding screen, behind which is a chamber pot.  That’s where Darwin used to vomit when overtaken by his illness.

What is amazing is Darwin’s output despite the illness. All of those books, all of the correspondence, all of that research — all done while he was feeling like crap.  It makes his achievements even more remarkable.

Anyway, scholars have of course speculated about what made Darwin sick.  The “diagnoses” have been all over the map, ranging from psychosomatic illness (perhaps brought on by fear that his theory would be rejected), to Chagas’ Disease (a trypanosome spread by the “kissing bug” of South and Central America, which produces a disease that can yield some of Darwin’s symptoms).

Now we have a new diagnosis, suggested in a paper from the December issue of the British Medical Journal by Australian developmental biologist John Hayman (and highlighted by the American Medical News).  His verdict: “cyclical vomiting syndrome (CVS),” a pretty horrible malady that seems to have some association with migraines.  Hayman claims that the disease is also associated with a mitochondrial DNA mutation, although the etiology is unclear.  Hayman explains that this diagnosis explains Darwin’s symptoms much better than do previous suggestions, including his recurrent seasickness on the Beagle, his eczema (skin infections are frequently associated with CVS), the vomiting, of course, and even some aberrant pigmentation of Darwin’s skin, visible in an 1881 portrait, that may be due to an imbalanced hormone titer.

I’m not a doctor, so all I can say is that this does seem a plausible explanation for Darwin’s symptoms, although the age of CVS onset is usually much younger: in children under the age of 10.  If it is due to an identifiable mutation in the mitochondria, it may be possible to find it in living members of the Wedgewood family (relatives of Darwin’s mother Susannah), since Darwin obviously couldn’t pass it on.

______________________

Hayman, John, A. 2009.  Diagnosis.  Darwin’s illness revisited. British Medical Journal, Published 13 December 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b4968

Octopus with airstream

January 22, 2010 • 6:29 am

A while back I mentioned a Current Biology article documenting the use of coconut shells by octopuses as shelters (the beasts carry the shells around with them).  Whether or not you regard this as tool use, have a look at this video documenting a similar behavior seen off the island of Flores (home of the “hobbit” people).  Here the canny cephalopod uses three half-shells from a bivalve.  The Current Biology home page describes the video:

Tomas Olsson has filmed a similar behavior while doing a night dive in Flores, Indonesia, near Maumere, in August 2007. He found a veined octopus buried in the silty bottom with some shells around him; it didn’t take long for the octopus to understand that he was discovered – he then emerged from his cover in the silty bottom with the three shell halves, handled them as the authors described in their article, and departed in a funny way with all three halves perfectly arranged underneath him.

h/t: Matthew Cobb, Current Biology

Anthony Lane reviews Creation

January 21, 2010 • 11:43 am

I don’t know of a better film critic than The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, a writer of erudition and endless wit.  In this week’s issue, he reviews the new Darwin movie, Creation. Sadly, it’s pretty much a pan:

As a journey through Darwin’s discoveries, “Creation” fails, although, given the intricacy and the patience of his working methods, it is hard to imagine how such a film might succeed. There is intensity here, but no impetus; if you want to see Paul Bettany fizzing with the drama of scientific findings, watch him instead as Maturin, the pre-Darwinian surgeon and sidekick to Russell Crowe, clambering around the Galápagos in “Master and Commander,” a tale with a strand of Beagle in its genes. . .

The truth is that “Creation,” though based on Randal Keynes’s fine book “Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution,” will irritate anyone versed in Darwinism and its dislodging of faith; . .

John Travis also wrote a lukewarm appraisal in Science last year.  There’s a trailer worth seeing appended to his review.

I guess I’m not all that keen to see the movie, if for no other reason than I have my own vision of who Darwin was, and don’t want it dispelled.  But I am curious how the glamorous Jennifer Connelly plays Emma Darwin.

UPDATE:  Another lukewarm review from Salon here.

Prize-winning wildlife photo STAGED

January 21, 2010 • 6:33 am

A while back I highlighted the results of the BBC wildlife photo contest, including the photo below, the grand prize winner, of a leaping wolf.   The BBC now reports that the photo was probably staged, the subject not a wild wolf but Ossian, a tame wolf who lives in a Spanish zoo. The contest winner has been stripped of his prize.

Fig. 1.  Too good to be true.

h/t: Otter